Month: January 2018

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New York (part one)

Millisphere, abstract noun: a discrete region inhabited by approximately one-thousandth of the total world population.

 

I had intended to continue examining the millispheres of Africa but after a recent tweet by Donald Trump, referring to African countries as “shitholes”, I thought I’d look at his millisphere – New York – for no other reason than to establish a benchmark for deciding what is and what is not a shithole.

 

The City of New York (1970 population 7.9 million, 2016 population 8.5 million) is the centre of the much larger “conurbation” (population twenty-five million) spread over several northeastern American states.

 

New York attracts more that 60 million tourists a year and has three of the ten most visited tourist sites in the world. Larry Morris (singer in the 1960s NZ band Larry’s Rebels) slipped across the border from Canada and spent a decade working in America as an undocumented alien, visiting New York “about three times a year.”

 

“I LOVED New York,” Larry said. “To me it was like a very big Ponsonby and I felt totally at ease there. I found parts of Manhattan very cold and dark looking though, Wall Street in particular, surrounded by massive skyscrapers that would not let the sun in unless directly overhead. Musically the New York jazz scene was especially cool and I loved Broadway and Central Park with its John Lennon memorial garden.”

 

Frederick Olmsted, who helped design Central Park, gained his organisational skills while in charge of sanitation on the American Civil War battlefields. Considered the grandfather of American landscape architecture, Olmsted later became an advocate for conservation and national parks.

 

Musicians: Joan Baez, Harry Belafonte, Tony Bennett, Maria Callas, Mariah Carey, Duke Ellington, Art Garfunkel, George and Ira Gershwin, Oscar Hammerstein, Lena Horne, Billy Joel, Norah Jones, Lady Gaga, Cyndi Lauper, Barry Manilow, Yehudi Menuhin, Gerry Mulligan, Harry Nilsson, The Ramones, Lou Reed, Carly Simon, Phoebe Snow, Artie Shaw and Fats Waller were all native New Yorkers. Hip Hop (Rap) music originated in the Bronx.

 

Many other musicians came to make their name in New York. Robert Zimmerman, from Minnesota, worked up his act in the folk clubs of Manhattan’s Greenwich Village – and changed his name to Bob Dylan. New Zealand’s Lorde got heckled at a New York concert, last week, for her principled decision to not play Tel Aviv,

 

New York has the largest Native American population in the United States – traditionally coming to work in high-rise construction. Although he looks Hispanic, singer Willy DeVille’s grandmother was one of the last purebred Native Americans in New York state and Willy was a New Yorker to his bones.

 

First Dutch, then English and finally American, New York became a destination for refugees from Europe; the Irish, Germans, Italians and East Europeans came to start a new life in the New World. “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to break free,” said Emma Lazarus – whose ancestors had emigrated from Germany and Portugal before the American revolution.

 

New York has the largest Chinese population of any city outside Asia and has 2.4 million Hispanics and 1.9 million Blacks. There are over 200 languages spoken in New York and half of all New Yorkers speak a language other than English at home. New York now has the largest foreign born population of any city in the world.

 

New York dealer galleries and art institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim arbitrate what constitutes “high art,” anointing locals like Diane Arbus, Edward Hopper and Roy Lichtenstein. New Zealand artists such as Billy Apple, Len Lye and Max Gimblett went to make their names in New York and Pittsburgh commercial artist Andy Warhol came for his “fifteen minutes of fame,” and stayed. Realist New York painter Norman Rockwell was loved worldwide for his kitch Saturday Evening Post covers and it was in New York that spray-can graffiti “bombing” originated, also to be embraced globally.

 

The most densely populated city in the United States, New York is known for its creativity, entrepreneurship, social tolerance, environmental sustainability, freedom and cultural diversity – for the other side of the coin check out next Tuesday’s On the contrary.

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Capetown (West Cape)

Millisphere, noun: A discrete region inhabited by one-thousandth of the total world population. around 7 million people, but anywhere between 3.5 and 14 million people. A lens to examine human geography.

The continent of Africa (population 1.2 billion) consists of about 170 millispheres. Sitting at the south-western tip of South Africa (population 55 million) is the former Cape Province (2016 population just under 14 million).

Roughly equating to the region where the Afrikaans language is spoken, the pre-apartheit Cape Province population was 6.7 million in 1967 and the population  has doubled in the past 50 years.

The Afrikaner population goes back to when the Dutch East India Company (VOC) established a warehouse/garden there in 1650 to restock its ships heading to and from the Indies.

It was the Portuguese who called it the Cape of Good Hope 150 years earlier — because it meant turning back to the tropics. Some of the oldest cave paintings in the world are at Blombos near Cape Town, going back 77,000 years to the San Bushmen.

The “Cape Coloureds” of Cape Town go back to the 17th century and the mixed races of the Dutch and their slaves, both Black and Malay.

Occupied by Great Britain during the Napoleonic Wars, Cape Town (population 3.7 million) is a modern multicultural city, with sizeable Indian and Malay communities. In South Africa, post-apartheid, poverty among whites increased and many blacks rose to the middle and upper classes. The South African population is 80 per cent black, 9 per cent white (down from 22 per cent a century ago), 9 per cent coloured and 2.5 per cent Asian, and there has been an influx of 5 million refugees from Africa.

The old Cape Province can be further divided into its modern post-apartheit provinces: Western Cape, 5.8m (Cape Town), Eastern Cape, 6.5m (Port Elizabeth, East London) and Northern Cape, 1.1m, (draining north into the Orange River).

The watersheds of Eastern and Western Cape drain south to where the Atlantic meets the Indian Ocean and both qualify as millispheres.

Eastern and Western Cape have interesting biogeographies because of an ancient chunk of Gondwanaland fusing with the African continent back in prehistory.

The cape floral kingdom is a biodiversity hot spot and is one of the worst areas in the world for the invasion of foreign weed species, including NZ pohutukawa and flax.

In the summer of 2018 Capetown can very close to running completely out to water.

South Africa has no “capital”. The Parliament is in Cape Town; the president and the administration are in Pretoria, as are the foreign embassies; Bloemfontein is the judicial centre and Johannesburg has the constitutional court (and serious crime).

South Africa was the first country to “renounce” nuclear weapons and it has the second highest murder rate in the world and the world’s highest rape rate.

A girl in South Africa is more likely to be raped than to complete secondary school and there are seven million South Africans with Aids.

South Africa’s solution to crime has been “gated communities”.

The private security industry is the largest in the world, with 400,000 registered guards — more than the police and army combined. Private security even guard the police stations so the poorly paid and ineffective police can do their “work”.

More than half of crime is unreported and violence is generally reasoned “OK” to resolve conflict.

The country is 80 per cent Christian, although 60 per cent of blacks consult “healers” and follow African spirit and ancestor beliefs.

Known for its gold mines, Johannesburg was once known as “Jewburg”. There were 120,000 South African Jews in the 1960s; now there are 67,000, many “returning” to Israel, where they have congregated in one of the richest suburbs in Israel.

Recently a white South African was granted asylum in Canada on the argument that whites were disproportionately affected by crime.

While those most affected by “crime” are actually the poor blacks, the murder rate for white farmers is around three times the South African average.

In the 1980s one SA rand was worth one US dollar, now it is 15 rand to the dollar.

While kleptomaniac Jacob Zuma continues to cling on to the South African Presidency, recently Cyril Ramaphosa, from the mine workers’ union, who is seen as the “least corrupt of a corrupt bunch”, has replaced him as president of the ANC, the country’s ruling party.